The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/24/23695772/twitter-blue-check-paid-verification-false-endorsement-dril
Tech

The social media site claims that dead celebs are following Blue

admin

A comment on King’s checkmark: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Khashoggi forking over $8 a month on Twitter’

Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Barbara Walters, Anthony Bourdain, and Paul Walker are just a few of the many deceased stars to have regained their verification status. The platform is even claiming that prominent journalist and columnist Jamal Khashoggi is forking over $8 a month despite having been murdered in 2018.

This is all consistent with the nonstop forum drama that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, but there’s one detail that’s particularly rankled King and others. These people aren’t being made clear they are paying for the service. If you hover over King’s checkmark, you’ll get this:

How weird is Twitter? Is Steven J. Musk a winning business strategy? The case for legal advice on social media, by M. Roberts

Look, you shouldn’t take legal advice from social media. People love throwing around strange interpretations of real laws. (Case in point: legal blogger Ken White’s perpetual nemesis RICO.) There’s a serious, well-reasoned discussion of how weird this situation is. The best I’ve seen is a long thread from Alexandra Roberts, a Northeastern University School of Law professor that we’ve cited at The Verge before.

Roberts makes clear there’s no slam dunk case against Twitter. There are many state and federal rules that you could argue about applying in a variety of ways, including the Lanham Act. Colorado, for instance, bans falsely representing “sponsorship, approval, status, affiliation, or connection” for a product. Is suggesting that Stephen King paid for Twitter Blue a sign that King approves of Twitter Blue? Roberts said the argument sounded like a reasonable one. Solicitor Simon McGarr makes some similar points in an article about how European false endorsement laws might apply.

And the entire dust-up hinges on some language that Twitter could easily change. Until last week, the checkmark label made clear that someone either had a certain level of notability or subscribed to Twitter Blue. That still appears to be how the system works, and reverting it would seem to address the underlying false endorsement claims pretty neatly.

Over the course of a single weekend, it was discovered that the most popular status symbol on the micro-Blogging platform had been turned into something that caused users to wonder if it was illegal. I can’t deny Musk’s talent for laying new and exciting legal minefields but I don’t think he’s a winning business strategy.

In
Previous post What to know about the Tree of Life trial
Next post Tucker Carlson is a great replacement

More Stories

How to watch the launch of a plane

admin

Boeing is set to launch its Starliner space capsule into orbit on Monday carrying human pilots for the first time. The test flight will come nearly 10 years after NASA awarded Boeing a more than $4 billion contract as part of their effort to pay private companies to help ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Read Microsoft’s memo on security first

admin

Microsoft has outlined a set of security principles and goals that are tied to compensation packages for its senior leadership team. Microsoft is adding Deputy Chief Information Security Officer to each product team and is moving its threat intelligence team to report directly to the CISO. Microsoft has implemented multifactor by default across over 1 million of its own tenants.

There are side effects of Covid vaccines

admin

Gregory Poland, the 68-year-old editor in chief of Vaccine, a scientific journal, has claimed that a loud whooshing sound in his ears accompanied his first COVID-19 vaccine shot. “Over three years have passed since a ringing in his ears, a racing heart, pain in his eyes, mouth and genitals was experienced by a New York City nurse practitioners,” Poland said.